I'm going to share a few of them. The first was when I was around 7 or 8 years old, I think. I had been wanting a bunk bed for a long time, despite being an only child. On Christmas morning I woke up, and the ceiling seemed awfully close. I looked around and realized my bed was high up in the air and I had no idea how to get down! So I did the only thing I could. "Mom! Dad! Help!" Dad had built me a "bunk" bed with no bottom bunk, so I could use the lower area as a play space. During the night they had managed to assemble it in my bedroom and lift me into it without awakening me!
The other one was when I was in high school. My tastes have always run to the vintage, and by high school I was dreaming of an antique wind-up Victrola. But I knew what they sold for in antique shops, and was certain it would be many years before I could get one. On this particular Christmas, I opened present after present of old 78 rpm records. There were close to a hundred of them in all. "Now I'll have to get a Victrola!" I laughed, because my record player was from the early 1990s and couldn't play 78s. Mom did a pretty good acting job of "Oh no! I thought your record player could play these!" Later, when we had finished opening presents, Dad sent me to the garage to grab some more kindling for the fire. With complete tunnel vision, I grabbed the wood and turned around to head inside. But someone said my name from the middle of the garage. I turned around, and there was Mom pointing the video camera at me. Right next to her was a beautiful full-size Mahogany colored wind-up Victrola! It turned out the parents of a coworker of Dad's were downsizing and had sold it to my parents for a price they couldn't pass up. I spent the next several hours playing each and every one of my new records. And the Victrola still stands proudly in my living room.
Those are a couple of my favorite specific Christmas memories. But even though those are both about presents I received, what I really value about Christmas is the traditions we developed: Squeezing orange juice with my parents early in the morning before the guests started arriving; the small ceremony we created for putting Baby Jesus into the manger of our nativity scene; the annual family dart gun fight...